Legal News

Junk the LSAT? Making the Case for a Better Test

By Ashby Jones

Should the LSAT be scrapped for something better, more predictive of success as a lawyer?

Two California academics think so. Former Berkeley law professor Marjorie Shultz and Berkeley psychology professor Sheldon Zedeck have created a test that they feel could be administered to law school applicants to measure their nascent lawyerly abilities. Click here for the story, from Wednesday’s NYT.

Instead of focusing on analytic ability — which is primarily what the LSAT does — the new test includes questions about how to respond to hypothetical situations. For example, it might ask what a test taker would do upon discovering that a top-performing employee had omitted something on an application.

Shultz said she began to examine the issue after California voters approved Proposition 209, which banned consideration of race in admissions. Through their research, Shultz and Zedeck produced a list of 26 characteristics, or "effectiveness factors," like the ability to write, manage stress, listen, research the law and solve problems. The professors then collected examples from the Berkeley alumni of specific behavior by lawyers that were considered more or less effective.

More than 1,100 Berkeley alums took the test and agreed to let the researchers see their original LSAT scores, as well as grades from college and law school.

According to the story, the study concluded that the alternative test results were more predictive than lawyer “effectiveness” than were LSAT results - although the new test was no better at predicting how well participants would do in law school. Unlike the LSAT, the new test did not produce a gap in scores among different racial or ethnic groups.

The next step for the study — to survey lawyers nationwide, not just alumni of Berkeley, to test the measures of lawyer quality in a bigger pool.

So far, other law-school deans seemed jazzed about the prospect of a different test.

John H. Garvey, dean of Boston College Law School, said, "It would be good for us and for other schools to have other measures that complement the LSAT and that would help us identify promising candidates."

LB Readers, we remember thinking, at the ripe old age of 23, that the LSAT was a challenging and fair test. Looking back after law school, our unscientific research told us that folks who did better on the test tended to perform better in the classroom and, we assumed, those were the folks most cut out for a long and successful lawyering career. But maybe we were wrong. Any thoughts?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 11, 2009 (boomark / email).